Prologue: the man who painted the sun

Somewhere around 1635, in a Rome crowded with painters from every country in Europe, a slow-spoken Frenchman from a Vosges village did something no European painter had quite dared before: he put the sun itself — not its symbol, not its effects, but the blinding disc at the centre of its own glare — into the middle of a picture, and made every other thing in the canvas exist the way things actually exist at evening: as silhouettes and half-lights swimming in an atmosphere that comes toward the eye. Contemporaries understood at once that something fundamental had happened. Sandrart, who knew him well, wrote that he "penetrated into the very nature of things"; Baldinucci, his other early biographer, reported that Roman painters simply called him the master "of the sun's light." For the next two hundred years, whenever Europe wished to imagine perfect light falling on a perfect world — in poetry, in gardens, in the tinted mirrors tourists carried to improve real scenery — the name it reached for was Claude.

The name itself needs a sentence, because it is a biography in miniature. He was baptised Claude Gellée, third of five sons of a small landowning family in Chamagne, a village in the duchy of Lorraine — then an independent state between France and the Empire, soon to be devastated by the Thirty Years War. Italy, which could not be expected to distinguish one Gellée from the tide of northern painters flooding over the Alps, called him after his homeland: Claudio lorenese, Claude le Lorrain, or — with the simplicity reserved for those who need no surname — Claude. The French claim him as the greatest French landscape painter; the Italians may fairly reply that he never painted a picture in France after his twenties; the English, who eventually owned most of his œuvre and rebuilt their parks in its image, called him simply the prince of landscape. He belongs, in truth, to a country that no longer has a name: the international Rome of the seventeenth century, where a Lorrainer taught by an Italian could sell Virgilian sunsets to popes, Spanish kings and French ambassadors, and be buried as a Roman parishioner with his accounts in order.

Two things make Claude's case singular among the great painters, and this essay pursues both. The first is the shape of the achievement itself: he was, by every account including his own patrons', a limited man — barely lettered, slow, without theoretical conversation, notoriously weak at painting the human figure — who nevertheless solved, more completely than anyone before and arguably anyone since, the single hardest problem in painting: how to represent light as a substance, air as a medium with depth and temperature, the sun's glare and the moisture of dawn, on a flat surface primed with brown earth. The intellectuals of the age — and Poussin, the other Frenchman of Rome, lived a few streets away — constructed landscape; Claude breathed it. How a pastry-cook's apprentice came to do this, by what training of hand and eye, with what pigments, grounds, glazes and daily discipline of observation, is the technical story at this essay's centre.

The second singularity is what Europe did with him afterwards. No painter's posthumous life is stranger. For two centuries his pictures set the standard of ideal beauty in landscape — Reynolds's Discourses institutionalised him, the English aristocracy emptied Italy of his canvases, landscape gardeners rebuilt whole valleys at Stourhead and Painshill to resemble him, and tourists judged the Alps and the Lakes through a smoked convex mirror called the Claude glass, finding nature acceptable insofar as it resembled a Gellée. Then, in the 1840s, a young English critic named John Ruskin, armed with Turner and a geologist's eye, made Claude the great negative example of Modern Painters — convicted him of painting formulas rather than facts — and the reputation fell as far as it had stood high. The twentieth century rebuilt him a third time, on new ground: the drawings, above all — the hundreds of sheets made outdoors in the Campagna, brushed in wash with a freedom that anticipates Corot and even Cézanne — revealed a Claude the eighteenth century never knew, an artist of direct perception whose 'artificial' paintings were distillations of the most sustained outdoor observation any artist had yet undertaken. The painter of the most conventional beauty in Europe turns out to have been, in method, the first plein-airist. That paradox — convention's monument built from observation's practice — is the essay's through-line.

He is also, it should be said at the outset, a painter whose life resists drama. He never married; he had no documented loves and one illegitimate daughter, Agnese, born when he was in his fifties, whom he raised in his house and made his heir; he was sued by no one of consequence, fled no city, killed no man; his two early biographers, Sandrart and Baldinucci, agree on his modesty, his piety, his slowness of speech and his single-minded industry. The drama is entirely in the work and in one act of self-defence that became a monument: when forgers began imitating him at the height of his first fame, Claude started a book — the Liber Veritatis, the Book of Truth — in which he drew, in his own hand, a record of every painting that left his studio, with notes of purchaser and destination. Kept for over forty years, two hundred drawings deep, it is at once the first catalogue raisonné in European art, compiled by its own subject; a masterpiece of draughtsmanship in its own right; and the reason his œuvre is, for a seventeenth-century painter, uniquely well anchored. The man who left almost no words left the most complete visual testimony any old master ever gave of his own production. This catalogue's companion page walks through that production work by work; the essay that follows walks through the life, the training, the method, the ideas and the long afterlife.

I. Lorraine: the duchy and the departure

Chamagne sits in the valley of the Moselle, in rolling wooded country between Épinal and Nancy — a landscape, biographers have not resisted observing, of long river meadows closed by screens of trees, not unlike the middle distances Claude would spend sixty years painting. He was born in 1600 — the year is inscribed on his tomb, though some modern scholars, reading the archives of Chamagne, have argued for 1604 or 1605 — to Jean Gellée and Anne Padose, small proprietors. Of formal education he received little; Baldinucci says he made poor progress at school, and his surviving letters and Liber inscriptions, in a phonetic mixture of French and Italian, confirm a man who wrote as he heard. Both parents were dead by about 1612, leaving Claude an orphan at twelve; he passed first to an elder brother in Freiburg im Breisgau — Jean, a woodcarver and engraver, from whom he may have had his first lessons in drawing — and then, in a move nobody has ever fully explained, south over the Alps.

The two early biographies diverge charmingly here, and the divergence is instructive. Baldinucci — who had his information from Claude's own nephews — says the boy travelled to Rome with a relative and entered the household of the landscape painter Agostino Tassi as a servant who gradually became a pupil. Sandrart — who had his information from Claude himself, over years of friendship — says he was apprenticed to the pastry trade (Lorraine cooks being in demand across Europe), travelled to Rome with a band of fellow pastry-cooks, and was taken on by Tassi as cook and household boy, grinding colours and cleaning brushes and, little by little, learning the painter's trade from the kitchen up. Scholarship inclines to see truth in both: an orphan with a marketable trade, a cousin on the road, a household that needed feeding, and a master who noticed the boy could draw. Either way, the outline is the same and remarkable: no academy, no articled apprenticeship in a painter's shop, no drawing after the antique under a master's rod — Europe's future arbiter of ideal beauty entered art through the servants' door.

The Rome he entered, around 1617, was the most competitive art market on earth. Caravaggio was seven years dead and his revolution everywhere; Annibale Carracci's Farnese ceiling had just redefined grand manner painting; the papal families — Borghese, then Ludovisi, then Barberini — were building and decorating palaces at a rate that sucked in painters from all Europe. Landscape, specifically, was having its founding moment: the Fleming Paul Bril had brought northern landscape craft to Roman fresco cycles; Adam Elsheimer, the visionary German, had died in 1610 leaving a handful of small coppers — moonlights, dawns, sacred figures dissolved in trees and light — that every painter in Rome studied like scripture; Annibale had invented, in the Doria lunettes, the 'ideal landscape' in which nature is recomposed around sacred story. The genre stood ready for its master, and the boy grinding Tassi's colours would become it.

Tassi, Wals, and the crooked path

Agostino Tassi is one of art history's more lurid characters — a Roman painter of seascapes, harbour views and illusionistic fresco quadratura, talented, quarrelsome, and notorious to posterity as the man convicted in 1612 of raping the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, his pupil. That the gentle Claude's master was this violent, gifted opportunist is one of the biography's ironies; but the debt is real and specific. From Tassi — himself formed partly on Bril — Claude took the very subjects that would make him famous: the harbour view with ships and wheeling light, the coast scene, the landscape staged in receding planes; and from Tassi's fresco practice he took the decorator's skills (perspective, architecture, the organisation of large wall surfaces) on which his first Roman reputation was built. The relationship, begun in the kitchen, lasted on and off into the 1620s; whatever else Tassi was, Claude never joined his detractors.

The other formative teacher was quieter and stranger. At some point in the early 1620s Claude went south to Naples and spent perhaps two years with Goffredo Wals, a German landscape painter from Cologne — a former Tassi assistant himself — whose tiny round paintings on copper reduce landscape to almost abstract essentials: a road, a wall, a tree, a low sun, silence. From Wals, scholars believe, Claude learned the poetics of simplification and the direct study of light on humble things; from Naples he took the Bay — Posillipo, Sorrento, the islands, the great sweep of sea framed by headlands — which furnished the misty marine distances of his seaports ever after. He remembered Naples all his life; decades later, patrons' inventories would describe pictures of his as 'ports in the manner of Naples' whether or not any real geography was intended.

In 1625, aged about twenty-five, Claude went home — the one documented return. He travelled through Venice (a detail Sandrart supplies, and the port pictures make plausible) and Bavaria, was robbed on the road, and arrived in a Lorraine about to be swallowed by the Thirty Years War. In Nancy he worked for a year under Claude Deruet, the duke's court painter, executing architectural backgrounds in fresco for the Carmelite church — honest, subordinate, decorator's work. Offered a court career in the small pond of Nancy — Deruet's world of ducal pageants and precise courtly fantasy, secure and provincial — he chose otherwise, and the choice is the biography's one decisive act of ambition: by late 1626 or 1627 he was back over the Alps, and Rome had him for the remaining fifty-five years of his life. He settled near the Piazza di Spagna, in the artists' quarter around Via Margutta where the northern colony lived, and never left central Italy again: a few sketching journeys — Tivoli, Subiaco, possibly Civitavecchia — are the entire subsequent geography of the man whose pictures taught Europe to travel.